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Saddam Hussein - obituary

For more than three decades Saddam Hussein imposed his will on Iraq through an elaborate network of terror. Fear was the principal means by which he stayed in power.

No-one was immune. His intelligence services spied on government ministers, business leaders, school teachers, journalists, judges. They spied on members of his own family. They even spied on each other. Under Saddam's leadership Iraq became a country in which everybody, without exception, knew that they were being watched at all times, and in which everybody knew that the price of disloyalty - real or perceived - was torture, imprisonment or death. This was the defining characteristic of his regime. Iraq was - notoriously - the 'Republic of Fear'.

The man who used fear so effectively was also its victim, however, as he showed in March 1991 after his forces had been expelled from Kuwait by an American-led coalition of half a million troops.